For proper business work such as online software downloads services will be required proper payment processing.

We’ve been using TrustCommerce.com for a over a year with SugarStats to do the recurring billing/subscriptions and credit card processing. Overall it has been a pleasant experience even though we had a few bumpy bits.

I’ve recently found out about BrainTree which seems to offer everything TrustCommerce does and then some in an all-in-one solution. While I’m a big fan of the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” saying, we’re considering switching.

TrustCommerce Pros and Cons

Pros:

Great Rails/Ruby Integration and API

Fairly good support

Great security and risk/fraud protection practices

Decent prices

Excellent recurring billing/subscription support

Cons

Support has slowly been going downhill. I even hear sales is non-responsive to new accounts.

Online Web Portal is a bit lacking and cumbersome for statistics

Need a separate company to be the merchant

Can’t combine multiple apps into one TC account

BrainTree

Pros

Seems to also have a superb API.

Rails/Ruby integration via a few diff plugins and especially great support via ActiveMerchant

Active community

Quickbooks Export/Import

Good reporting/Analytics tools in web control panel

All-in-one solution which includes merchant and gateway

Can have multiple sites behind one web control panel login

Great security and risk/fraud protection

Supports both major credit cards AND Paypal/Google Checkout/BillMeLater

I hear support is great

Fee’s: ???

Cons

Don’t know yet.

The real benefit I’m seeing is the multiple sites behind one login, Paypal/Google/BillMeLater payment and the active community/ActiveMerchant support. If the web control panel interface is at all better than TrustCommerce I’ll be very please as well.

Now this isn’t new, I saw it a long time ago but though I’d post on it now that the project has matured a bit. You can’t buy them off the street just yet but it is pretty kick ass none-the-less.

What is Slurpr? Basically a Frankenstein mini-PC packed with 6 WiFi cards/antenna’s in one tiny box that aggregates multiple open (or closed) WiFi signals into one big bandwidth pipe. Or according to the site:

“A big, fat access point with a large antenna and a bunch of Wi-Fi cards that automatically connect to the strongest signals it can pick up. Then it would combine all these signals into one FreeLoading Broadband Canal for me to use”

Nice.

It can easily crack easy WEP passwords on the fly. Being that I used to do lots of WiFi when I lived in San Fran I would have loved to have one of these. Using maybe 6 x high-gain 15dbi antenna’s and the right arial placement we could be talking about some major bandwidth and great for war driving. I’ll take one